Blog of the EMPA Conference

Tag Archives: Queensland

I recently had the fabulous opportunity to be part of a group of 14 Victorian public service staff from across government deployed for two weeks to work with the Queensland Department of Communities on cyclone recovery.

Working as part of Department of Communities’ Needs Assessment Teams, we were based in Cairns and travelled each day to the cyclone-affected areas of Mission Beach, El Arish, Tully and Cardwell along the Cassowary Coast in far north Queensland. The main relief centre was located at Tully, and from there we would divide into teams of two, and together with a representative from Life Line or Red Cross and with (literally) a cut lunch, map, four-wheel drive and a cheque book, we would set out to call on all the properties in the area assigned to us each day.

Whilst the humidity, torrential rain and flash flooding, concerns about Dengue fever and crocodiles, and five hours each day on the bus where a challenge, this was one of the most amazing and humbling experiences I have had. The Needs Assessment Team members, both Victorian and Queensland, proved to be an intrepid, experienced group who showed amazing versatility and commitment, no matter what the task. Navigating unfamiliar roads (where many of the road signs had blown away), arranging emergency accommodation, tracking down material aid, assessing grants, even rescuing three chickens and an injured rooster – it seemed no job was beyond us and there were lively stories each afternoon on the bus.

It was such a privilege to meet so many local people and to be shown, first hand, the affect TC Yasi on their homes, farms and livelihoods. Anna Bligh was right when she said they breed them tough in Queensland; we found such courage and stoicism in the midst of the most terrible damage to properties and communities. In one small town the impact of the cyclone had been so severe that the actual coastline had been re-shaped to the extent that one person’s block of land no longer existed.

I found a great many similarities between cyclone recovery and bushfire recovery – the need for water, fuel, generators, clothing, temporary shelter, grants, insurance claims, the sense of disrupted lives, the guilt of those whose homes were intact, the need for social support and to be able to tell your story.

I am so grateful to have had this experience and hope to use it to further illustrate the value of building community resilience as a strategy for disaster preparedness and recovery.

From the Queensland floods to the Christchurch earthquake and the tsunami in Japan, the major disasters which we’ve already experienced during these first few months of 2011 have already demonstrated that social media has now found a place in emergency management. Social media is not replacing existing media, of course, but providing an important additional channel both for sharing information about the crisis itself, as well as for gathering first-hand information from those directly affected by the it. Managed appropriately, social media can become an important tool for emergency authorities and local residents alike.

In the Mapping Online Publics research project at Queensland University of Technology, we’re interested in the use of social media (including blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr) by Australians in general, and during acute events in particular. Based in Brisbane, we’ve experienced first-hand the role of Twitter and Facebook during the recent floods in Queensland, and the excellent use made of those tools by the Queensland Police Service in particular, and we’ve continued to track the role of Twitter in Christchurch and Japan as well as in other emergency situations.

To do so, we’ve also developed a range of innovative new research methods for tracking, capturing, and analysing social media activities around specific events and issues, and we’re working with a number of national and international partners to further develop and apply these methodologies. Already, we’re able to track the evolution of crisis events on Twitter on an almost real-time basis, and we’re looking to apply those insights in working with emergency authorities to further enhance their strategies for using social media platforms as part of their overall emergency media responses.

I’m looking forward to finding out more from the EMPA community about how they’re currently approaching social media, and how we might collaborate on further approaches. In the meantime, please feel free to visit our project website for a snapshot of our research activities.

The world has changed post floods and cyclones. The devastation was tragic and widespread throughout Queensland, with many communities still trying to recover.

The impact for the Queensland Police Service (QPS) Media and Public Affairs Branch has also been significant. Our use of social media during these crises has been well documented, but what happens next?

We established Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts last year to ensure we had an online community of followers before a disaster occurred. Little were we to know natural disasters of such magnitude were just around the corner, or that so many people would turn to our social media accounts for information in a crisis.

At the EMPA conference, I’ll give some brief insights into the incredibly rapid growth of our social media accounts during the crises, how we managed them and how we were able to improve our service to the media and community through the use of social media. I will also touch on where we go from here as the QPS looks to the future of managing large communities of online followers.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it – check us out on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, @QPSmedia.

-Simon Kelly

Simon is the Acting Deputy Director, Queensland Police Service Media and Public Affairs Branch and will deliver a paper at the EMPA conference on Queensland Police Service’s use of social media during the recent Queensland floods.

Craig Thomler is a federal public servant who works within the Department of Health and Aging. He has worked in various roles within the online industry since 1995, and as such has a wealth of knowledge on his blog. I heard him speak about gov2.0 late last year, and while he was preaching to the converted, he was a captivating speaker, offering various insights on web2.0 generally, as well as govt2.0 and social media communications. Well worth reading his blog and following him on Twitter.

In a roundabout way, that brings me to the purpose of this post, the Queensland floods, social media and particularly the Queensland Police Media Twitter account, @QPSmedia and their Facebook page. So much has been written about their efforts throughout #qldfloods, so visit Craig’s blog for his post on how Queensland Police demonstrated best practice emergency communications via social media. There are some links in there to some great articles about Queensland Police and their social media use in there too.

Sandeep (@DizzyDeep) remarked to me today that the Queensland floods will go down as the way to conduct emergency communications via social media, and I think he is right.

Victorian also suffered record flooding over January 2011, and Victoria Police also showed us another best practice example of how to engage in emergency communications via social media, with their Twitter account @VictoriaPolice providing updates and advice throughout the floods.

Crisis and emergency mapping could be the way forward in emergency media and community information. In my experience it is a great way to give an overview of specific information relating to an emergency by placing data on a map. For example, if the emergency was a bushfire, information that could be displayed could include where the bushfire was sighted (flames), where smoke can be seen from, where spot fires are occurring, wind direction at specific locations, where firefighters are and where residents are leaving properties. This is by no means an extensive list; there could be many more details that could be included. By placing all this information on a map, the users has the ability to get a general overview of the situation, or focus on any specific area they’re interested in to gain more information.

Why is this the way forward? This information comes from the community on the ground. Perhaps the leading example of crisis data mapping currently is using the Ushahidi platform.

Ushahidi isn’t exactly new, it’s been around since the beginning of 2008, and was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout. A short, basic, rundown of it is as follows.

The platform can be downloaded onto your computer, and deployed from there. Reports are integrated into your platform from sources such as SMS, Twitter, email, submitting to a website or using a smartphone app. In a large scale emergency, teams of volunteers can be used to validate information that is posted on the map (they can call/email/SMS back to those who submit asking for more information if required). Posts appear on the map as either ‘verified’ or ‘unverified’.

But knowledge of what Ushahidi is, what it can do and how it can help in an emergency is growing, both here in Australia and overseas.

Here in Australia, there have been a couple Ushahidi deployments in recent times. The ABC set up a flood crisis map for the Queensland floods. The map has now closed, but you are able to view all the information posted up to 31 January 2011. Over a thousand pieces of information from the public have been posted, ranging from reports of road closures, property damage, where evacuations are/have taken place, where the electricity is/was off and where volunteers are needed. This is all community information, from people on the ground, in the know, going out to the world, effectively saying ‘this is what’s going on’.

What are the implications of this on emergency services agencies in Australia? To them, I suspect Ushahidi is a whole new (and scary) way of information coming in. Here is a fantastic opportunity to grasp community to community and community to agency information and use it to inform the emergency response.

Ushahidi say ABC’s deployment of the platform was “one of the biggest Ushahidi deployments to date, both in terms of popularity” and how many different Ushahidi apps the ABC utilised. This shows the community in Australia has a thirst for on the ground information they can use. This has the potential to grow exponentially if a number of factors align, including but not limited to: emergency services recognising this as an avenue for information and providing appropriate resources, the community finding this information useful, volunteers and those with the appropriate knowledge to maintain the platform 24/7 during a deployment and Internet and phone coverage stability during an emergency. I’m sure there are more issues that would need resolving.

It’s important to remember crisis mapping is by no means a replacement, or the same as calling 000 to report an emergency. Nothing can replace this at the present moment.

I mentioned above that there has been a couple of Ushahidi deployments in Australia, and got carried away with the ABC’s Queensland floods. Whoops. There is also Bushfire Connect, run by a not-for-profit, which went live on 7 February 2011. More on that next time.